In brief: Capsized cop, jail board booed, and another Tar-jay?

Another Tar-jay?

Local mogul Coran Capshaw’s Riverbend Development has plans for the former Kmart shopping center on Hydraulic, now known as Hillsdale Place. The company went before the Planning Commission May 14 for entrance corridor approval (after C-VILLE went to press).

The plans keep the existing footprint of the center that’s been closed since 2017. An 8,000-square-foot plaza lined
with shops and restaurants will be the space’s new focal point.

A Target-red-colored anchor, an outdoors store that looks suspiciously like an REI, and a mysterious storefront dubbed “Bells & Whistles” are depicted in the drawings.

Quote of the week

“There’s no way to prepare for a madman.” —WINA’s Dori Zook reports on the May 11 machete attack of two hikers on the Appalachian trail, one of whom was killed. James Louis Jordan, 30, of Massachusetts, faces federal charges.

ICE wins

The Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail Authority Board voted 7-4 to continue voluntarily notifying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement when an undocumented inmate is released from jail, prompting explosive reactions from some people in the audience. Activists had been pressing the board to change its policy for more than a year.

Hit and run

Police are searching for the driver of a dark-colored sedan that grazed a pedestrian around 11pm May 9 on Pine Street near the Islamic Society of Central Virginia. Police do not believe the victim was intentionally targeted, but the mosque, which is holding nightly prayers during Ramadan, has a GoFundMe campaign to pay for additional security measures, and is now paying a police officer $40 an hour to be there every night.

Photo by Edward Thomas

Cop on a roll

An unusual sight on Seventh Street caught the eyes of many passersby last week, when a Charlottesville police cruiser rolled backward over a steep embankment, narrowly missing an apartment window. Only its front end could be seen peeking over the hill, putting it in a pretty challenging position for a tow. Cops say an officer exited his car to chase a suspect on foot—and you can probably guess what happened next.

Sheared

Greene County Commonwealth’s Attorney Matt Hardin cut his 10-inch tresses and donated them to Locks of Love May 8.

New ride

Megabus is launching a route from Charlottesville to Dulles Airport beginning May 16. The service will leave from the Seventh Street SW entrance of the Amtrak station and run Thursdays through Mondays, for $25 to Dulles and $20 back. Megabus entered the local market last fall, causing the Starlight Express to halt, and a trip to New York City that once took about six and a half hours now takes nine or 10.

Sheepskin stats

UVA will hand out 7,090 degrees over the upcoming weekend, about the same as last year.

4,211 baccalaureate degrees, 151 of which were earned in a speedy three years, and five in a super-fast two years.

Primary day is June 11, and there’s more on the ballot than the 57th District race between Kathy Galvin and Sally Hudson. If you live in the city, the three people who win the Democratic nomination will likely be the ones to fill the three empty seats on City Council in November because

More than a year and a half after a freelance reporter requested the Virginia State Police and the Office of Public Safety turn over its Unite the Right public safety plans, a judge ruled today that it’s time for the state to cough them up—although with some confusion about redaction and

The reliably Democratic 57th District rarely makes for an exciting horse race. Once a delegate, always a delegate, as David Toscano and Mitch Van Yahres before him proved, each easily holding on to the seat representing Charlottesville and the Albemarle urban ring as long as he chose. Not this

By Shrey Dua Just months out from the blackface scandal that rocked Virginia’s Democratic leadership and threatened Ralph Northam’s governorship, all of 10 people showed up May 15 to learn about UVA’s history of blackface. At a talk that was one of several held last week as part of the city’s

Special interests If you’ve got an agenda, you’ve gotta have a PAC. A political action committee is the device of choice for individuals, corporations, developers, teachers, and many others to further their interests by funneling money or other support to political candidates. While a PAC is

By Carroll Trainum On Thursday, May 16, at least a hundred people stood in line at the demolition site of University Hall—the former hub of UVA basketball—to get a brick. They all had their own memories of U-Hall, known to some as “the house that Ralph built,” and they wanted a piece of

By Ali Sullivan After four months of surveys, conversations, community gatherings and focus groups, the committee formed by University of Virginia President Jim Ryan to evaluate the relationship between the university and the surrounding community released its final report in February. UVA

Tucked on the fourth floor of Newcomb Hall in back of UVA’s Academical Village are offices of the student-run committee that investigates, charges, and tries fellow students accused of lying, cheating, or stealing. Its bylaws require panels to hand down the same punishment for any single

UVA President Jim Ryan, a law school alum and former faculty member, took office August 1, just before the anniversary of the Unite the Right violence. As the year went on, he announced a new School of Data Science and watched the men’s basketball team take home its first-ever national

By Ben Hitchcock At 10:30pm on May 4, 1970, approximately 1,500 UVA students gathered on the Lawn to protest the murder of four student activists at Kent State University earlier that day. On April 28, 1983, a group of 100 students marched up to the office of Student Affairs Vice President

Two men convicted of malicious wounding for attacking DeAndre Harris in a downtown parking garage on August 12, 2017, are appealing their convictions, and the Virginia Attorney General’s office will now prosecute their cases. Jacob Goodwin and Alex Ramos were sentenced to eight and six years in

Some issues don’t just go away if you ignore them. Aside from a brief appearance at the May 6 City Council meeting, the last time we heard from UVA alum Guy Lopez was 2002, when the university was considering whether to invest $4 million in the University of Arizona’s Mount Graham Observatory

It’s National Bike Month, and Peter Krebs is fired up. Krebs, who’s the community outreach coordinator at the Piedmont Environmental Council, uses the word “exciting” more than any other when talking about the new bicycle and pedestrian plan he’s helped develop with the Thomas Jefferson

Charlottesville is a growing city. We’ve added 5,000 residents since 2010, with another 10,000 in the county. And by 2040, projections from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service show an additional 6,000 people in Charlottesville and 33,500 in the county (roughly), bringing our total

They appeared overnight the first Monday in December of 2018, long-necked robots on wheels, lurking in neat rows of three or four on street corners all over town. Within a few days, the motorized scooters, which don’t have designated docking stations, were everywhere, and wherever. Now, about

More than 100 people representing a dozen organizations rallied and marched in support of residents of Belmont Apartments May 5, the same day tenants whose leases have expired were told to vacate their apartments at 1000 Monticello Rd. The Charlottesville Low-Income Housing Coalition gathered

Judge Rick Moore got one big issue out of the way in the two-years-long lawsuit against the city and City Council for its 2017 vote to remove statues of Confederate generals: The monuments of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are indeed war memorials under state code, which prohibits

Though the gifted education program in Charlottesville City Schools has recently come under fire for its racial disparities, such gaps have existed since the program was created in 1976, and may have even been part of its intention. At tonight’s School Board meeting, former Charlottesville High

Governor Ralph Northam approved the University of Virginia’s proposal to renovate Alderman Library on March 24, sending the $160 million project into development. The renovation, which has been planned since 2016, involves removing a significant percentage of the library’s books and turning its

To the list of racial disparities in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, we can add arrest rates: According to a new study, African Americans are booked at significantly higher rates than whites at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, and the greatest disproportionality occurs during